by Willow Rose
“We are walking in circles,” she said. “We passed that pond two hours ago.”
“Hmmm…” Manolo grumbled. “Magic clouds can get a little mischievous if they want.”
“So you think it might be teasing us?”
She looked up at the cloud and saw it smile widely. Then it speeded up and they started to run to keep up.
“Yes, I am afraid so,” Manolo said.
“So what do we do?”
“We play along.”
“What? Why?”
“Because it has to lead us in the right direction at some point. It is bound to, it is its task and it has to fulfill it. A leading-cloud has to help anyone who asks it for direction.”
“So what you are saying is that we have to do everything it says until it decides to finally fulfill its task?”
“Yes.”
Manolo was breathing heavily now. He, too, was getting exhausted.
“Even though we don’t know when that is going to be?”
“Yes. It is our only hope.”
Finally the cloud slowed down and stopped. Manolo and Sara threw themselves onto the ground and caught their breath. Then Manolo hurried and got food and water out for them to eat. When they were done they looked at the cloud above them with great anticipation. But nothing happened.
“Maybe he wants us to camp for the night here?” Sara asked after an hour of silence from the cloud.
“Maybe you are right,” Manolo said. “The sun is almost setting and we need to get some sleep.”
He took out their blankets and made a bed of branches and pine needles for her.
“But what if the cloud moves while we are sleeping?” Sara said.
“Then we will have to follow it.”
Sara looked up at the cloud. As the sun went down and it got darker the cloud became lighter, almost white, and it lit up in the sky.
“We have to take turns to sleep,” Manolo said.
Sara nodded.
“You will go first,” Manolo said.
And so she did. She put her head on the moist forest soil and fell immediately into a deep sleep.
When Manolo woke her up, the cloud still hadn’t moved. Manolo lay down on the ground and fell into a deep sleep while Sara watched the cloud above her. Everything was so quiet. An owl was making a noise from a tree somewhere but other than that there was nothing. It was a night of a full moon and she enjoyed staring at this big white planet in the sky dreaming about the day she would hold her little brother in her arms again and he would smile at her. Sara sat there quietly for a long time and let her mind drift off.
Until she heard something.
Like a howling. Sara got up from the ground she had been sitting on and looked around her. It sounded like a wolf, she thought. A wolf howling at the moon.
The rest of the night Sara was alert and watched every move of the forest and its animals. She looked after the sleeping Manolo, keeping an eye on the cloud in the sky as she looked out for animal movements. By the time Manolo woke up, she was tired and asked to get half an hour of sleep more. Manolo agreed to that since the cloud hadn’t moved yet. Just before she dozed off Sara told Manolo about the wolf she had heard, and he promised her to keep an eye out for it.
Two hours later Sara woke up. It was bright daylight. She sat up, Manolo was still sitting at his spot. The cloud, now black, had not yet moved. It had turned black again.
“Are we leaving soon?” she asked while packing the blanket in Manolo’s bag.
“Don’t know,” he answered.
Sara ate and began to feel strong again. She took a quick swim in a small lake close by, and when she came back both Manolo and the cloud were in the same place as when she left them.
She sat next to him and stared at the cloud in the blue sky. It wasn’t smiling or even winking as it had been the day before. Sara wondered if it had all been something she had imagined. It didn’t even look like it had a face any longer.
“Maybe it is the wrong cloud,” she said.
Manolo scraped the ground with a stick.
”No. This is the one,” he said.
“So it is being mischievous again?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Since they couldn’t quite do anything about it, they decided to keep waiting for the cloud to move again. It was their only guidance so it wasn’t like they had any choice.
Sara killed the time by making drawings in the soft soil with a pointy stick she found. She made a picture of a beautiful horse, and she thought for a while about their beautiful stallion that they had to let go of in the singing cave. It sure would have helped them a lot to have had a horse on the rest of the trip. Sara was tired of walking, tired of putting her fate at the mercy of a mischievous black cloud.
She looked up once again. She felt like yelling at it, waking it up and getting it to move. So she did.
“Hey cloud!” she yelled. “Is it going to be today or what?”
But nothing happened.
They waited like that for hours and hours, and as the afternoon came, the cloud still showed no sign whatsoever that it was about to move.
Sara stood up again.
“I say we just start walking,” she said. “Maybe we can find the path on our own without the cloud.”
Manolo stood up as well. He sighed and put a hand on her shoulder.
“We need patience, that is what we need. Just sit down and rest,” he said.
But as he opened his mouth to speak more, Sara started jumping and yelling pointing to the sky.
“The cloud, the cloud! It is moving!”
They both looked up and saw the cloud suddenly move very fast across the sky.
Manolo took Sara by the hand and they started to follow it again.
After a while, they arrived at a small road that they followed until it ended at a mountainside. It just stopped and they couldn’t go any further, although it seemed as if the road continued on the other side of the wall. Manolo felt the mountainside while Sara stared at the cloud. It kept on moving and stopped at the top of the mountain where it seemed to be waiting for them.
“Do you think we need to climb the mountain?” Sara asked.
Manolo kept feeling the mountainside with his hands.
“No. I think this is a way in. We need to go in the mountain.”
“So you think this is like a door or a gate? But how are we going to open it and go in?”
Manolo shook his head.
“I honestly don’t know.”
Hardly had he said the words before Sara saw something. She stepped closer to the mountain and dusted dirt away with her hand.
“Look. It is an inscription,” she said.
Manolo stepped up next to her.
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know that language.”
Manolo looked at it for a while.
“It is Romani. The language of our ancestors.”
“Do you know how to read it?”
“I know a little bit.”
“Give it a try, then.”
Manolo stood in front of the inscription for a long time, mumbling before he finally said:
“It seems that it is an entrance to a chamber. My guess is that there is something in there that we need to get for later on in our quest. The good spirits probably sent us the cloud to guide us to this place.”
“But how do we get in there?”
“We need a key of some sort. I think it says that we need a rhyme.”
“And how do we get that? Does it say?”
“We need to find someone called Abigail.”
When they left, the cloud was still hanging over the mountaintop. They looked at each other and decided that they could only hope that it would still be there when they returned.
They walked across the valley where they had spotted a small village build on the side of a mountain. They found a narrow road that led them into the village, which consis
ted of only eight houses on each side of the road, made of clay and straw The village seemed empty. Not a face to be seen. They went to the first house on the road and knocked on the wooden door. Nothing happened. The house had no windows so they couldn’t look inside to see if anyone was there but just hadn’t heard them. They tried the next house and the next one again but had the same result. All eight houses and only one result.
No one opened their door.
“It seems like the village is empty,” Manolo said and looked at Sara.
“But how are we going to find Abigail, then?” she asked.
“We have to keep on looking,” Manolo said. He pointed at what looked like an old monastery located on a cliff a little higher up the mountain. “Maybe the nuns up there know something.”
They climbed the mountain following a small path of gravel and got to the monastery on the cliff. It, too, seemed abandoned. The gravel path was overgrown with weeds, and as they walked closer, Sara and Manolo could tell that most of the monastery was in ruins. The roof had almost completely collapsed and only the front was still standing.
It looked like it happened a long time ago, Sara thought to herself. The place was all overgrown with weeds and wild flowers. Like a graveyard, she thought. It was as if nature slowly and patiently stitched a delicate bandage to cover the wounds made by man.
The broken windows, the peeling walls and the weeds that reached into every crack and fracture of the walls, it all gave off a depressing sense of isolation and abandonment. But just as they were about to give up on finding anyone here, they heard a voice from the back of the monastery, an area where the roof was intact.
“What are you doing out here?” the voice said.
They turned and saw an old woman. Her dress was torn and worn out, her skin pale and wrinkled.
“Come in before you are seen,” she said and showed them a door leading inside the monastery.
Inside, eight small women and six men greeted them with much cheering. They poured water in cups and gave them fish and bread to eat.
“Where do you come from?” a woman asked. “It has been several years since we last had contact with the outside world.”
“How come?” Sara asked with her mouth full of bread and fish.
“Well we did have an airplane crash in the valley a couple of years ago,” another woman said. “We helped the poor fellow out of the burning plane and we nursed him for weeks and weeks till he got well.”
“Then what happened to him?”
There was much mumbling among the men and women and Sara got a feeling that they didn’t particularly want to share that part of the story.
“He.. He .. went off. He said he had to go back to the war. He was fighting some war far away. A soldier he was.”
“The Second World War,” Manolo said.
“We don’t know much about that. Being isolated from the world as we are makes you not care about them anymore.”
“But what about the soldier? Did he get back to where he came from?”
Again there was a mumbling.
“Well, you see … not exactly.”
“What happened?”
“He got in her way.”
“Who’s way?” Manolo asked. ”What happened?”
”Well … she squashed him.”
Sara and Manolo looked at each other with much confusion.
“Who squashed him?” Sara asked.
A man stepped forward. He was small and had the friendliest eyes Sara had seen in a long time.
“It was Abigail,” he said.
Then there was another mumbling and a lot of headshaking. Sara looked at Manolo. Abigail – like the one they were looking for.
“We are looking for this Abigail. Can you tell us where to find her?”
The mumbling became loud shocking sounds and wild gestures.
“No, no, no, you can’t. You have to stay here now,” said the woman that had helped them inside.
“But it is very important that we talk to her.”
“Oh no! No talking! You have to stay here from now on.”
Sara looked at Manolo. Were they telling them that they had to stay at the monastery for the rest of their lives? All that solitude seemed to have made them go collectively insane.
“Listen, everybody. We are here because Abigail has something that we need. Therefore we need to talk to her as soon as possible.”
“I am sorry but I am afraid we can’t let you leave the monastery again,” the man with the friendly eyes said. “Never again. It is far too dangerous.”
“Abigail will crush you,” another woman said. “Like she did the soldier. She is merciless. Only Nathaniel knows how to go to the river and get fish for us to eat.”
The man named Nathaniel stepped forward slightly bowing his head.
“But why does she crush people? Have you tried to kill her?”
The woman looked at Sara like she was the one who was crazy.
“Killing a ten foot giant snail? Now how are we supposed to do that?”
Another woman took over. She wore a scarf over her head and seemed shy.
“Abigail means no harm. She is just so clumsy,” she said.
The rest of the people in the monastery started talking amongst themselves.
“There she goes again.”
”Always defending that stupid snail.”
“Well it is the truth,” said the shy woman with a low voice. “I just know that she doesn’t mean to hurt us.”
Angry voices spread among the others.
”Doesn’t mean us any harm? How can you say that?” said one.
“To get away from her and save our lives we had to leave our nice village and move to this monastery which she crushed most of so we only have a small part of it to live in. And you say she means us no harm?” said another.
“She doesn’t,” the shy woman continued with her low voice.
“And see what she did to the good soldier. He went outside and then she squashed him,” the man with the friendly eyes said. “And what about Juan and Penelope? They went off on their honeymoon and never came back. We found them squashed into the mud down by the river, choked and suffocated in snail-slime.”
“It was probably an accident,” the shy woman continued.
“Well I don’t think any of these incidents were accidents,” the woman that had helped them inside the monastery said. “None of us do. Abigail has terrorized our lives for years and years. That is why we stay inside and only Nathaniel goes down to the river and catches fish for us at night.”
“How do you get bread?” Manolo asked and took a bite of the bread they had given them.
“We have a small field behind the monastery. We go there to harvest one night once a year. Each day we hope and pray that Abigail won’t see where it is and destroy the harvest.”
The man with the friendly eyes gestured with his hands.
“Fish and bread, bread and fish that is all we ever eat in here,” he looked at Sara with a crazy look in his eyes. “Bread and fish, fish and bread is all we will ever get to eat because of that stupid snail.”
“What happens if I go outside?” Sara asked.
“She will see you and start following you until she can get her chance to kill you, cold-blooded as she is.”
“We didn’t see her when we came here.”
“You were very lucky. Normally she sees everything.”
That night they slept in the monastery but before they fell asleep they talked about what they had heard.
“A giant snail?” Sara said. ”What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Manolo said. “But we are definitely not staying in here more than one night. That is for sure.”
“I know. We will go insane after a day or two.”
“That is one thing that is certain,” Manolo said while yawning.
“So what do we do then?”
“We get out of here as the first thing in the morning and we find that snail
.”
“That’s a date.”
Sara put her head on the white pillow and enjoyed being in a real soft bed instead of on the hard and cold ground. Just before she dozed off she was certain she heard a wolf howling in the distance.
Manolo woke her up. He was shaking her gently and talking with a low voice.
“Sara, Sara, we need to get up.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him with a smile.
“And a good morning to you, too,” she said and sat in the bed. She looked out the window. It was still dark.
“It’s not even morning yet?” She asked.
Manolo hushed her.
“No, we need to get going before everybody wakes up.”
“Okay,” she said with a tired voice and started packing her things.
They climbed out the window in order not to wake up anyone in the monastery. Manolo had tied a couple of sheets together and they used them to climb down to the ground from their room on the second floor.
They had no idea where to begin their search for the snail, but Manolo suggested that they go down to the valley and tried to look by the river.
“Where Juan and Penelope were found in the mud?” Sara asked.
Manolo nodded.
“It is important that we keep our eyes and ears open for anything unusual.”
“I definitely don’t want to get squashed in the mud and suffocate on snail-slime,” Sara said.
“Neither do I.”
So they wandered down the mountainside and passed the empty village before they finally stood at the river. It was still dark and the slightly declining moon was right over their heads, big and shiny white. Everything was so quiet by the river. Occasionally they heard a fish jump out of the water and the cicadas were singing in the bushes. But other than that they heard only the running water.
“Do snails sleep?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know,” Manolo said. “Probably.”
He bent down and touched the ground with his fingers. Then he took something up and smelled it. He made a face that told Sara this wasn’t nice.
“What is it?”
“Snail-slime,” he said while playing with the slimy stuff between his hands. “Look,” he said and pointed at the ground. “It is a trail.”